Music Group Sues Another Batch

The Recording Industry Association of America said Tuesday it is suing another 532 people -- including 89 on university campuses -- in its latest wave of lawsuits against alleged file swappers.

Since September, the industry trade group has tried to sue 1,977 people in various parts of the country for allegedly trading music illegally on file-sharing networks. Most of the suits are pending. This time, the RIAA made a point of targeting people who trade on university campuses, who are most likely students.

"This is a group that does not appreciate as much as the general population that it is illegal to share copyright music on a peer-to-peer network," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "More education is necessary. One form of education is lawsuits."

The RIAA does not have the name of any of the individuals. The music trade group filed "John Doe" lawsuits that finger people based on their Internet protocol address. The RIAA must get the permission of a judge before they can subpoena universities and ISPs to get the actual name of the alleged swapper.

Lamy said that in an effort to maximize efficiency and minimize costs, the RIAA sought to target people distributing files on university networks in geographic regions where the music trade group has legal counsel. The RIAA will expand the lawsuits to other areas in the coming months.

Lawsuits against the 443 others who allegedly offered music using commercial Internet service providers were filed in California, Colorado, Missouri, Texas and Virginia.

Representatives of some of the schools said they have worked hard to stop illegal file sharing on their campuses.

"We have told all of our students here on campus that downloading music of this type is illegal and they are subject to prosecution," said Ben Tracy, a spokesman for Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of the schools that hosted an alleged file trader. "This is not a joke, and there are real consequences for these actions that they are undertaking."

Tracy said school officials handed out literature at the beginning of the year to inform students of the law. Posters that read "It's not file sharing, it's file stealing" are posted in all the residence halls. And if the school finds students using the college network to share files illegally, they lose their connection to school servers.

"We've done just about everything we can aside from sitting in their room and watching exactly what they are doing," Tracy said.

Last year, the RIAA sued four students who were operating so-called "Napster-like" networks on campus that enabled their peers to share music files among themselves. The students all settled with the music trade group for between $12,000 and $17,500.